e-vangelistic about technology and daylife

Daylife

Daylife is launching a new service today – the Enterprise API, which is a new component of the Daylife Platform.

Enterprise API will help a publisher/blogger establish an API for their content. They can choose to keep the API private or spread the love and make it public to developers.

How did we come to this idea?

We have been working at the Daylife API for almost two years now, and one of the most commonly used features by our partners and developers has been the filtering of content by a set of sources (what we call source filtering) to either:

b)Present a different perspective of news about a topic/subject by only showing content from, say, Travel sources (USA Today’s Cruise Log) or Conservative Politics sources or just blogs.

c)Give us an exclusive private feed of their media so we “Daylife-ize” that content and give you a full set of APIs to query for that content. Washington Post gave us an exclusive photo feed and now they use our Search API to build photo galleries on events like the 2008 Elections or the Olympics.

So we saw value in a publisher having an API for their content either for private or public use.

I saw a demo of Trendrr at the Apr 1st New York Tech meetup. Seemed like an easy way to throw all your data at one place and get some graphs in basic layouts (line,bar,area charts). Mark Ghuneim well utilized his 5 minute demo slot to show what trendrr can do and how their users have used their API. The best graph I liked was the one tracking someone’s CPU usage. You can then embed these graphs anywhere you want or export the data as xml, json or even an excel spreadsheet.

Its always tricky to keep things simple and introduce advanced features. The graph currently is exported as an image. If it could be exported as HTML, I would love to have the capability to click on the data point and go to the real source of that data. In that case, the trendrr API will need to accept a link along with each data point. The timeline widget on the daylife.com topic pages support similar functionality.

The delay between sending the data through the API and it showing up on the graphs is pretty significant. It would be great if does not take more than a minute.

Read more below about how I implemented the mashup of Trendrr and Daylife APIs.

We started putting together everything that we or daylife‘s API users have done with the API as collection of posts on this drupal powered site called The Cookbook. Michael asked me to write a few lines as to what I think the cookbook is. This is what I came up with:

The Cookbook is a collection of recipes from daylifers and the cookbook community to discover what you can do with the Daylife platform. These recipes are ideas, how-tos, sample code, case studies, FAQs for what you can do with the Daylife platform. It is a place to post your recipes for the projects you have cooked with the Daylife platform and share your knowledge and expertise with the community. Share, Steal, Post, Comment, Love, Applaud, Criticize, Go Crazy!